Stunning 160-Piece Harlem Renaissance Exhibition To Open At Met

HARLEM, NY — A groundbreaking exhibition on the Harlem Renaissance will open at the Metropolitan Museum of Art — the first major museum show on the topic in over 35 years.

Called "The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism," the show will run from Feb. 25 until July 28 and will host 160 works showcasing how Black artists during that time portrayed everyday life in the cities imbued with new Black populations due to the Great Migration — the period starting in the 1920s when millions fled the segregated south for northern cities — and how it let to a new Black international modern art movement.

According to the Met, this is the first survey of the subject since 1987.

“This landmark exhibition reframes the Harlem Renaissance, cementing its place as the first African American – led movement of international modern art,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and CEO.

“Through compelling portraits, vibrant city scenes, history paintings, depictions of early mass protests and activism , and dynamic portrayals of night life created by leading artists of the time," Hollein continued, "the exhibition boldly underscores the movement’s pivotal role in shaping the portrayal of the modern Black subject — and indeed the very fabric of early 20th - century modern art."

The exhibit will run through the various stages of the era, starting with the origins of the New Negro movement — a term coined by its founding philosopher, Howard University professor Alain Locke — showcasing the dialogues and debates within, from W.E.B. Du Bois and Charles S. Johnson to influential literary and music figures including Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and James Weldon Johnson.

Artists who committed to depicting Black subjects in radically modern way to upheave racial stereotypes will form the core of the exhibit and gallery halls, with portrait and scene painting, film, sculpture, photography and cover illustrations from books and periodicals of the era, like the NAACP's "Crisis" and the National Urban League's "Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life."

Those New Negro artist will range across an array of styles — from African and Egyptian aesthetics and European avant-garde pictorial movements to classicized academic traditions — and will feature artists like Charles Alston, Aaron Douglas, Meta Warrick Fuller, Palmer Hayden, Bert Hurley, William H. Johnson, Archibald Motley, Jr., Winold Reiss, Augusta Savage, James Van Der Zee — whose archive The Met recently acquired — and Laura Wheeler Waring.

Galleries will also feature the New Negro artists who took to Europe during periods of expatriation. Their work will be presented in direct juxtaposition with portrayals of the international African diaspora by Black and white European artists including Henri Matisse, Edvard Munch , and Pablo Picasso, as well as Germaine Casse, Kees van Dongen, Jacob Epstein and Ronald Moody.

Other rooms will showcase the social justice movements of the era, examining the era's approach to queer identity, colorism, class and interracial tensions, and the dialogue between the close of the New Negro era and the start of the Civil Rights era, like Romare Bearden's 15-foot-wide series of collages, "The Block," which is a part of The Met collection.

A sizable number of works will be on loan from Historically Black Colleges and Universities, including Clark Atlanta Art Museum, Fisk University Galleries, Hampton University Art Museum and the Howard University Museum of Art, plus more from the National Portrait Gallery, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Other works come from private loans and European Museums.